In order to increase user engagement, existing social networking systems encourage users to connect with as many people as possible. As a result, users typically have many connections they do not interact with on the social network. Also, the connections a user interacts with tends to change over time. In order to maintain a set of significant connections, a user may have to remove or disassociated from some connections. Existing methods require that a user manually remove a connection which is inconvenient, time consuming and in some cases socially unacceptable.
Some existing social networks allow a user to specify lists or groups of connections that are important to the user. However, many users do not take advantage of this feature because it is complicated and time consuming.